Turning the administrations part of this story into message.
If for citizens "get legal" goes well, for administrations would be:
Be moral. Provide free access to information through open standards. Use
OpenOffice.org to communicate documents to your citizens!
OK. It's a bit forced, but perhaps our creative contributors will refine
the message or come with a better one.
:)
~cdriga
Cristian Driga wrote:
Hi John,
John McCreesh wrote:
Another example like Daniel's of yeaterday:
BSA offers £20k piracy bounty to rat on your boss
Three-quarters of staff say they'd drop their employer in it...
http://newsletters.silicon.cneteu.net/t/115934/463176/183536/0/
Please send any other examples to this list. I'm keen to do something
under the strapline - "Get legal - get OpenOffice.org"
How about administrations forcing citizens to buy software from the same
unique vendor ?
I am sure this is the case for other countries too, but here is the
example I know:
Many public institutions and administration here in Romania, still
provide electronic documents to citizens, through official websites, in
the old 'de facto' standard .DOC format.
This is without offering at least an alternative PDF (for non-editable
docs) and ODT (for editable docs) download (like you already see on some
if not all Eropean Union's sites).
More, in Romania the average monthly salary is approximately half of the
cost of MSFT Office (so, too many people need to not eat 2 months to buy
a copy of this software).
Under the circumstances, people who need to use those documents are
tempted to use illegal copies of MS-Office. Same goes for small
businesses which are forced to interact this way with authorities.
It's administration's fault because they are not enforcing yet the usage
of open standards in administration. Due to low salaries here, usage of
illegal copies of software is encouraged this way.
Some people say: Hey, luckily there is OpenOffice.org which can open
those documents and save them in the same format (and this goes in the
line of get legal - if this solution spreads well across population).
But what if OOo and similar solutions did not existed (like it was since
long before SO5 and OOo) ?
In other words:
1. this message about getting legal is good for citizens from this
perspective too
2. we could gather links to public administration sites in countries
still offering only .DOC formats to citizens and index them as examples
of bad conduct.
Forcing them to offer an alternative non proprietary file format, also
brings OOo/SO under their attention. (How about online petitioning
respective govts to offer ODT alternative downloads ? :)
I'd like to hear from other countries too if there are similar situations.
Best,
Cristian
Thanks - John
--
Cristian DRIGA
==
OpenOffice.org Romanian Native Language Project Lead
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
ro.openoffice.org
www.openoffice.org
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